How to Restore Scroll Bars (Excel 2013)

I’ve never hidden scroll bars by accident or on purpose, especially in Excel files because there are just way too many columns and rows that I have to deal with. One fine busy day, I received a file from one of my colleagues, a file that I have previously sent to him for editing and I am 200% sure I did not hide or disable the scrolling. Guess what? Yep, the scroll bars in that file went Houdini on me:

And here’s how I got it back.

1. Click the Filetab and click Options.

2. Click the Advancedcategory.

3. Look for Display options for this workbook, then select both Show horizontal scroll bar and Show vertical scroll bar check boxes. Click OK.

4. There you have it, the scroll bars fully restored!

So, what happened was, he hid the scroll bars to maximize the view on a projected screen and he forgot to undo it before sending the file to me. Pfftt… I’ll get used to it.